Comment 4 for bug 494067

The GNOME and KDE folks are collaborating with the freedesktop.org people on
some of these matters. Eg stuff like the system tray for mail notifications
http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/systemtray/systemtray-spec.html and desktop
entries for menu entries
http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/desktop-entry-spec.html
might be handy resources.
Perhaps a "freedesktops" integration bug would be good place to start, rather
than going for GNOME or KDE specific behaviours if it can be avoided. They're
trying to standardise their mime types too.